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An Phoblacht: Racism and resistance in Australia

This article first appeared in An Phoblacht, Ireland’s biggest selling political weekly
newspaper. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with An Phoblacht's permission. An Phoblacht reflects views of Sinn Fein. For more information about An Phoblacht click HERE.

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By Emma Clancy

February 25, 2010 -- An Phoblacht -- When Australia's Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal people in
February 2008, hopes were high that this indicated a new approach from
the government in its relations with the country’s Indigenous people.

But
Rudd, elected in November 2007 after 11 years of conservative,
Thatcherite rule under John Howard, has continued many of his
predecessor’s policies, which undermine the rights and wellbeing of
Australia’s Indigenous people.

2007 marked the 40th anniversary of
the national referendum that acknowledged Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples as citizens in their own land. Prior to 1967,
Indigenous affairs had been assigned to the "flora and fauna" department
of government – they were not even recognised as human beings.

An
Aboriginal civil rights movement, supported by progressive
non-Aboriginals, arose in the 1960s, inspired by the black civil rights
movement in the United States. This movement was just the latest
incarnation of resistance in the long history of struggle for Indigenous
rights since Australia was invaded and established as a series of penal
colonies by the British in 1788.

At the time of invasion, there were
approximately 1 million Aboriginal people living in Australia; today
there are 200,000. Indigenous people resisted colonisation, and their
sovereignty of the land was never ceded. No treaty or agreement was ever
negotiated. The British invented the myth of terra nullius – land
without people – to justify their brutal annexation of the country.

Genocidal
violence was carried out by the colonisers against the Indigenous
people for many decades following invasion. In Tasmania in the early
1800s the entire Aboriginal population was killed, and massacres were
carried out with impunity across the continent right up until the 1930s. Throughout
the 19th century, whole populations were forced off their lands into
missions, and their language and culture were banned.

Up until the
1970s, Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and
communities, in order to "assimilate" what was labelled a "failed race"
into the broader Australian population. These children, who numbered in
the tens of thousands, are collectively known as the Stolen
Generations. They were lied to about their heritage, and were often used
as slave labour – as domestic servants, on cattle stations, or in state
or church-run institutions. Many were physically and sexually abused.

Massive inequalities

Despite achieving formal equality, Aboriginal
people remain the most oppressed and marginalised group in the country.

The
absolute health crisis in Indigenous communities today is routinely
described as a national disgrace – or "genocide by neglect". The life
expectancy of Indigenous people is 17 years younger than the national
average – one of the lowest life expectancies in the world. In 2006,
Save the Children described conditions in impoverished black communities
in Australia as “some of the worst we have seen in our work all around
the world”.

Extreme racism persists at all levels of society and is
institutionalised in the policing and justice system. While Aboriginal
people make up 2% of the Australian population, they make up 26% of
prisoners. Most Aboriginal women in jail are there for crimes of
poverty, such as not paying fines. Deaths in custody continue.

In
1990 a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody produced a
list of 339 recommendations to prevent deaths; but not a single one has
been implemented. Since the report was produced more than 200 Aboriginal
people have died in custody, usually through police violence, suicide
and neglect.

Apology

A popular slogan of the
Aboriginal rights movement is, “White Australia has a black history”.
But this history is not taught in Australian schools. To acknowledge
that the brutality of the past even occurred is to subscribe to “the
black armband view of history”, according to John Howard and other
conservative commentators.

On February 13, 2008, Rudd did what Howard
refused to for his 11 years in power – he said sorry to the Stolen
Generations. The apology was an important and necessary symbolic step
forward and made a significant contribution to raising the level of
awareness in Australian society of the wrongs that have been done to the
country’s Indigenous people. But the rhetoric of reconciliation from
the Labor government has unfortunately not been matched by actions.

The
Aboriginal community welcomed the apology but have insisted that it’s
meaningless if not accompanied by major changes in government policy,
including providing compensation for the Stolen Generations and other
victims of racist colonial policies; negotiating a treaty; massively
increasing funding to deal with the crisis in Indigenous healthcare,
education and housing; and reforming the policing and justice system to
end institutionalised racism.

Intervention

The
key issue that Aborigines want the government to address is the
ongoing "intervention" into remote Indigenous communities in the
Northern Territory (NT), initiated in June 2007 by Howard and continued,
even expanded, by Rudd.

The intervention, which includes sending
the army and more police into these communities under the pretext of
preventing child abuse, has been described by Aboriginal leaders as a "racist land grab".

Following the publication of the report Little
Children Are Sacred in 2007, which documented the sexual abuse of
children in remote Aboriginal communities in the NT, Howard passed the
NT Emergency Response legislation in June 2007, unilaterally taking over
more than 70 communities. Under the legislation, 50 per cent of
welfare recipients’ payments are "quarantined" – replaced with food
ration cards that can only be used at major supermarket chains. Alcohol
is banned for all residents in the "intervened" communities.

Young
people have to have compulsory medical examinations to check for signs
of abuse. Child health workers have pointed out that these forced
examinations are themselves a form of child abuse.

The issue of
child abuse has been cynically exploited by both Howard and Rudd, but
several reports on the impact of the intervention have shown that
incidence of child abuse was no higher in Indigenous communities than in
the broader Australian population and that the intervention has failed
to reduce either child abuse or violence against women.

The Little
Children report included 97 proposals to address social problems that
can lead to abuse and neglect (including housing shortages,
overcrowding, and lack of primary health-care programs) but none of
these have been implemented by Howard or Rudd.

While police carry
out "military-style" raids on remote NT communities, arresting hundreds
of people for "alcohol offences", not a single new house or women’s
shelter has been built, nor a single new social worker been put on the
ground.

Land grab

The UN, Amnesty
International and even Australian government-commissioned reports have
all found that the intervention is a violation of the rights of
Aboriginal people and that the legislation is inherently racist. To pass
the legislation, the government had to suspend the Racial
Discrimination Act. It also suspended the NT Land Rights Act.

Land
ownership in the communities has been transferred from communal land councils to the federal government under five-year "leases", and there
is now a push from the government to extend this to 40-year and even
99-year leases.

Thousands of people are fleeing "intervened"
communities, resulting in more homelessness and overcrowding in the
larger town camps and urban fringes. The voucher system has forced a
huge population dispersion. People are being forced off their
traditional land and away from their communities to redeem the vouchers.

The long battle for land rights – crucial for establishing
Aboriginal self-determination – is being rolled back 40 years by this
intervention. And it’s just a happy coincidence for the government and
mining giants that 75 per cent of Australia’s uranium deposits are found
in the NT, most of it on land now affected by the intervention.Demanding
an end to this new wave of dispossession, Aboriginal leaders have
stated that, “Saying sorry means you won’t do it again”.

Protest
leader: We won’t submit to the new paternalism

As part of the
Northern Territory (NT) intervention in Australia, launched by former
Prime Minister John Howard in 2007, the military and police were sent
into remote Aboriginal communities under the pretext of preventing the
sexual abuse of children.

While the government has since changed,
with the election of the Labor Party under Kevin Rudd at the end of
2007, there have been no changes made to government policy, and the
Indigenous people of the desert land have begun a remarkable and
inspiring campaign of resistance.

As part of this, the Alyawarr
people staged a walk-off from the Ampilatwatja community in the NT in
July 2009. They walked beyond the boundary of the government lease
forced onto their land, and back to their traditional homeland where
they have set up a protest camp, saying they refuse to live under the
government’s paternalistic control.

Alyawarr elder and walk-off
protest leader Richard Downs (pictured) provided his first-hand view of the NT
intervention in an interview earlier this month.

“The situation since
the start of the intervention back in 2007 has meant total
disempowerment of the Indigenous people in the NT. Since the
intervention, consultation and partnership projects have been abandoned.

"Aboriginal
people now have no right to engage with the government at any level.
The government makes no attempt to consult or engage Aboriginal
organisations on any issue.

"This has taken us back 40 to 50 years.

"It
has taken Aboriginal people that long to build up our organisations, to
implement programs (totally underfunded by governments) and establish a
working partnership with the government. We had some measure of
control.

"But when those army tanks came to stay in our communities,
we lost everything. Our offices were closed down. All have gone after
decades spent building these organisations and associations. We’ve lost
all of them.

"At first, there was shock and fear in the communities.
It appeared to us that the Australian government was going to war with
Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. There were tanks and
military personnel with guns.

"People were threatened by the federal
police with guns and targeted with laser-sighted guns.

"We couldn’t
understand why this was happening. We have nothing to fight with, we are
a peaceful people. News of the violence spread like wildfire across the
territory and people were really afraid of the army coming in. This
fear of the military had people in its grip for nearly 18 months.

"Then
people got over their fear. They have begun to stand up against the
government policy of intervention by walking off the communities where
we currently live. These communities were created by previous
governments, as they have herded us into smaller and smaller spaces,
away from our homelands.

"The current situation with the NT
intervention is not working and should end. We want the territory and
federal governments to engage and consult with us. The original 2007
Little Children Are Sacred report [documenting the sexual abuse of
children in remote Aboriginal communities] that was prepared by Patricia
Anderson and Rex Wild has recommendations we should put on the table.

"Part
of the policy is the creation of 15 or 20 hub towns throughout the
territory and the closing down of our traditional homelands. The hub
towns will get all the new houses of the funds allocated in the
intervention. These hub towns will mean the loss of over 73 communities.

"They
will force people into these hub towns, creating ghettos. There are 73
language groups in the region. A mixture of different tongues means that
some will die away completely. Once you lose the language, the culture,
traditions and ceremonies are also lost. This strategy of the
government is about ending the traditional customs of our people.

"The
justification for the intervention was that sexual abuse of children
was rife throughout the communities. This was a complete lie, like the
“children overboard” lie. [In the lead-up to the 2004 federal election,
John Howard had claimed that Middle Eastern refugees on the Tampa ship
had “thrown their own children overboard” into the sea to try to
pressure the Australian government into allowing them to enter
Australia. It took several years for this to be exposed as absolutely
untrue.]

"If you look at the 2007 Little Children Are Scared report,
it clearly states that the sexual abuse of young Aboriginal girls and
women is mostly committed by non-Aboriginal people living in the area.

"The
report also stated that the sexual abuse of young girls and children is
not a black issue, it’s a national issue. And the Australian Crime
Commission confirms this. It was all lies – the federal government’s
excuse to send in the military and take control of Aboriginal affairs.

"This
is much clearer when you look at the issuing of [mining] exploration licences.
In 2006, there were 180 exploration licences issued; in 2009 there were
400. What is of great interest to the government – and mining interests –
are the huge deposits of uranium, gold, oil and iron ore on Aboriginal
land.

"At first we did try to engage with the government
representatives appointed to our communities as part of the
intervention. We tried to work with them and give them advice about the
communities, but they wouldn’t listen.

"That’s when we decided that we
don’t want to be part of it. We thought: the country outside of the
townships is our traditional homeland, we’ll move back out there.

"Our
walk-off is aimed at the governments to show them that we can create a
homeland. We will be focusing on building the communities with renewable
energy and permaculture, where people will live off the land in a way
where people are comfortable and happy.

"When we walked off, we had
over 250 people with us. We said to the younger generation that they
should stay in the community because of the children who need to go to
school. They can support the old people by visiting regularly.

"We
are now planning to build a new community in our traditional homeland.
This action is about our self-determination. We want to show the
government and the Australian people, black and white, that you don’t
have to accept such paternalistic control. That you can set up a
sustainable homeland with solar power, wind turbines and permaculture
systems.

"This is going to happen at the protest camp as a statement
on climate change, on moving away from fossil fuels and using clean
energy.

"The government wants to lease the whole northern part of
Australia, a pristine wilderness, to those who would rip it all out and
pollute the waterways, the streams, the oceans and the air.

"That’s
why it’s so important for all of us, Aboriginal people and
non-Aboriginal people to come together and stop this happening.”

Comments

Recently you published a copy of an article by Emma Clancy about Australian Aboriginal policy and issues.

This article was full of inaccurate information, to the extent that it is very misleading and liable to cause quite wrong analysis and conclusions.

To give you some idea what I am talking about, Clancy claims there are only 200,000 Australian Aboriginal people left alive today. In fact the 2006 Census counted almost 455,026, and estimated that at least another 60,000 Aboriginal people had not been counted. The Census also noted that the Aboriginal population was growing very rapidly, and had increased by 14% since the previous count in 2001.

Clancy claims that “the life expectancy is 17 years younger than the national average”. In fact, in 2008 the Australian Bureau of Statistics issued a paper which stated: “'The results indicate a difference at the Australia level of 11.8 years for males and 10.0 years for females.”

Clancy claims that, out of a 1990 Royal Commission’s 339 recommendations “not a single one has been implemented.” This is an absurd claim. Many of these recommendations were implemented in the 1990s. For example, the NSW Law Reform Commission’s Report 96 in 2000 stated that more than half of the 229 recommendations applicable to NSW had been implemented in whole or in part.

These examples provide some insight to the astonishingly poor quality of research undertaken by Ms Clancy in this article.

In her section on the Northern Territory Intervention, Ms Clancy goes into overdrive on the inaccuracy count. Some examples of her statements that are misleading, or worse, include:

1. “food ration cards … can only be used at major supermarket chains.” [This is absolutely untrue: the cards are used in almost all the small local stores, and a great variety of non-chain outlets]

2. “Alcohol is banned for all residents in the "intervened" communities.” [Alcohol continues to be supplied for consumption on licence through licensed beer halls on eight large communities, and residents of all communities are permitted to buy and consume unlimited amounts of alcohol when in the non-prescribed major regional centres]

3. “Young people have to have compulsory medical examinations to check for signs of abuse.” [This was originally proposed, but quickly dropped. No such examinations occurred as part of the Intervention medical checks]

4. “several reports on the impact of the intervention have shown that incidence of child abuse was no higher in Indigenous communities than in the broader Australian population” [ABC Online reported on 22nd Oct 2009 that “The NT Family and Community Services annual report shows there were more than 6000 notifications of child abuse last financial year - 2500 more than during the previous year.” On January 21st 2010, the ABC reported that “The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) survey shows Indigenous children are eight times more likely to be placed on a protection order than their non-Indigenous counterparts.”]

5. “The Little Children report included 97 proposals to address social problems that can lead to abuse and neglect (including housing shortages, overcrowding, and lack of primary health-care programs) but none of these have been implemented by Howard or Rudd.” [In fact, primary health-care programs have been massively increased, and a large house building program has now started]

6. “While police carry out "military-style" raids on remote NT communities, arresting hundreds of people for "alcohol offences", not a single new house or women’s shelter has been built, nor a single new social worker been put on the ground.” [I live and work on several of the remote communities in question, and I can state that Ms Clancy is wrong. I have not heard about any of these "military-style" raids, but I have seen the new women’s shelters and I work with social workers that are funded through the Intervention]

7. “It also suspended the NT Land Rights Act.” [The NT Land Rights Act has not been suspended. It still operates and governs over 40% of the NT’s land mass]

8. “Thousands of people are fleeing "intervened" communities, resulting in more homelessness and overcrowding in the larger town camps and urban fringes.” [This is a greatly exaggerated version of the truth. There has been some increase in the urban population, but not nearly as large an increase as the anti-Intervention propagandists would have people believe]

9. “The voucher system has forced a huge population dispersion.” [There is absolutely no evidence that the voucher system has led to population shifts. People can not escape the voucher system by shifting address, and the Centrelink data does not show any evidence of large population shifts]

10. “People are being forced off their traditional land and away from their communities to redeem the vouchers.” [Another wrong assertion. Almost all remote stores are licensed to take the vouchers]

11. “The long battle for land rights – crucial for establishing Aboriginal self-determination – is being rolled back 40 years by this intervention.” [This is simple scare-mongering, and is not true]

12. “And it’s just a happy coincidence for the government and mining giants that 75 per cent of Australia’s uranium deposits are found in the NT, most of it on land now affected by the intervention.” [The NT has nowhere near 75% of the uranium deposits. Both WA and Qld have more]

The interview with Richard Downs is similarly full of mischievous untruths, exaggeration and hyperbole. “When those army tanks came to stay in our communities, we lost everything … There were tanks and military personnel with guns … people were targeted with laser-sighted guns” he says. Richard must have been hallucinating. There were no tanks or guns, and nobody was targeted with laser-sights; but then, Richard wasn’t actually around when the Intervention started, so why worry about the truth when you are trying to attract attention by telling great big fibs?

The recommendations that the government adopted were in a sense sub recomendations that were to compliment the key.recommendations like inclusive meaningful consultation but seem to cherry pick whats suits their agenda, and is now just another failed government policy to to the already long list. The first recommendation from all the external reports is to reinstate the racial discrimination act and conduct meaningful consutation. Bobs lack of understanding of human rights or just total lack humanity is the common theme, great example of selective understanding and justification to accept deep seeded beliefs ofone persons human rights is worth more than anothers. As of the date of this comment you can get the stats from 4years of the intervention and all I can conclude is that all towns and citys could only dream of having such low levels of child abuse and civil disorder, one stat before I go over 7000 kids had medical checks and only 4 kids were found to be subjected to any type of abuse.